Innova Physics UPV Handbook

Edition 2026-27 · version 1.0

Innova Physics UPV is a student engineering team of the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV), recognised within Generación Espontánea, the university’s programme for student teams. We design, build and test tabletop electron accelerators, and we publish every design as open hardware.

This handbook explains what we are building, how the team is organised and how we work. It is written for anyone who wants to know us: students thinking of joining, other universities, sponsors and the university itself. It is kept short on purpose. Members learn the detail inside the team.

Why we exist

Particle accelerators are built by institutions, and a student rarely works on one before a master’s thesis or a PhD. Yet the field is large and needs engineers: more than 50,000 accelerators operate worldwide, and fewer than 6% of them serve fundamental research. The rest work in medicine and industry, in radiotherapy, sterilisation, semiconductor fabrication and materials processing [1].

ALOHA, A Linear Open-Hardware Accelerator, is our answer: tabletop machines designed by undergraduates, with every drawing published under an open licence so that other universities can build their own.

An accelerator is also an unusually complete engineering object. Even a tabletop machine needs vacuum, high voltage, electron emission, beam optics, control electronics, firmware, mechanical integration, diagnostics and radiation safety, all working together. Few student projects offer that breadth.

What we aim to do

• Train our members by having them design, build and test real machines under the supervision of a professor.
• Build open machines, starting with an electron source designed to serve two of them, and publish every design so that others can build their own.
• Open accelerator design to every student at the UPV through the UPV Accelerator Challenge, held each July from 2027.

In five lines

Build a beam you can see, and use it to find our people.
Build a beam you can measure, and use it to read a painting.
Build a beam that accelerates, once the first two have earned it.
Every July, teach what we have learned to anyone who wants to build.
Meanwhile, publish every drawing and hand every machine over to people who were not there when it started.

About this edition

We revise this handbook every September, together with the team’s plan, and date each edition. It holds what we expect to stay true for a whole season, and the page This season is the one rewritten each year. Schedules, rosters and procedures live on our website or in the team’s internal documentation.

The text of this handbook is released under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (CC BY 4.0) [2].